A Timeline of P&S History

1818
Valentine Mott (1806 graduate) is the first surgeon in the world to operate on the innominate artery, a vessel near the heart, to treat an aneurysm. The daring operation to ligate that artery had never been tried.

1872
Huntington disease is identified by George Huntington a year after he graduated from P&S.

1911
Columbia University and Presbyterian Hospital sign an agreement to establish the world’s first academic medical center.

1939
Pediatrician Hattie Alexander, MD, develops the first effective treatment for a lethal form of bacterial meningitis.

Late 1930s
Graduate student Charles Drew identifies an efficient way to process and store large quantities of blood, paving the way for modern blood banking.

1940
Dickinson Richards (1923 graduate), left, and André Cournand develop a technique to catheterize the heart, forever changing cardiopulmonary research and patient care. The work earns them the 1956 Nobel Prize.

1943
Bacitracin is developed as a new antibiotic, one that remains in use today.

2017
Structural biologist Joachim Frank, PhD, receives a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in using cryo-electron microscopy to reveal the structures of large biological molecules at atomic resolution.

These contributions include several made by alumni who were also faculty members. See below for a list of other alumni who changed medicine over the past 250 years.

John Torrey (1818), a medical botanist for whom Torrey’s Peak and Torrey Pine are named

David McDonogh, a slave who completed studies at P&S in 1847 but was not allowed to graduate yet is considered to be America’s first African-American eye specialist

Amos Wilson Abbott (1869), founder of Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis and a founder of the American College of Surgeons

Edward Trudeau (1871), TB specialist and public health pioneer

William Welch (1875), one of “Big Four” founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital

L. Emmett Holt (1880), pediatrics pioneer

M. Allen Starr (1880), pioneer in development of neurology as a specialty

Oswald Avery (1904), pioneer in immunochemistry who discovered DNA as the substance responsible for heredity

Burrill Crohn (1907), identified Crohn’s disease

Alvan Barach (1919), developed first practical oxygen tent

Gulli Lindh Muller (1921), who made it possible for women to study at P&S

Virginia Kneeland Frantz (1922), member of surgical pathology team that described the insulin secretion of pancreatic tumors